IVOA Executive Committee Meeting (FM28)Sunday May 18 2008 @ 16.00-18.00 GMT (18.00-20.00 European Summer Time)
Contents
LogisticsAt Trieste interop - see InterOpMay2008 - Vulcania 2.Agenda: DRAFT 20080512
| ||||||||
Changed: | ||||||||
< < | ||||||||
> > | ||||||||
Reports from the ProjectsArVOAstroGridAustralia-VOChina-VO | ||||||||
Changed: | ||||||||
< < | There is no much further news from China-VO. Please refer to the TM27 report here. | |||||||
> > | There is no much further news from China-VO. Please refer to the TM27 report here. | |||||||
CVOThe main VO-related development project at CADC is the migration of several major archives (CFHT, HST, GEMINI) to use our Common Archive Observation Model (CAOM) in the main archive database (Sybase) and to harvest all the common metadata to our data warehouse (DB2 cluster). This will allow CADC to deliver data through multiple protocols (SIA, SSA, and TAP) from a common, high performance data warehouse. The focus of the migration is on data engineering to produce quality metadata and consistent, high quality products. We recently ingested all the metadata for the MACHO survey and are delivering this content through a registered SIA service, in addition to the CADC web site. P. Dowler is an active participant in the VOQL-TEG discussions leading to the ADQL specification; he is also working on TAP.Euro-VOFrance VOGAVOHVOJapan-VOKorean VONVOThe NVO Book—“The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astro-nomical Research”—was published as Volume 382 in the Astronomical Society of the Pacific Conference Series. The book is based on the materials developed for the three NVO Summer Schools. M. Graham (Caltech), M. Fitzpatrick (NOAO), and T. McGlynn (NASA GSFC/HEASARC) edited the book. The NVO project had an exhibit at the January AAS Meeting in Austin, Texas. Pre-release components of the data discovery portal were demonstrated, and the theme “NVO Inside” was used to highlight how many organizations are making data and services available through VO protocols. The first edition of the NVO Newsletter was distributed in March to a mailing list of nearly 400 people who have expressed interest in the VO. The Newsletter is also available on the NVO web site. We are now accepting applications for the fourth NVO Summer School, which will be held in Santa Fe, New Mexico in early September. The Summer School faculty has been planning the program and assessing the need for new or updated software and tutorials. Much progress was made on the deployment of the new registry schema. All IVOA registries worldwide were scheduled to be updated in late April. Also, initial implementations of VOSpace were under development, and interoperability testing between VOSpaces at Caltech, JHU, and in AstroGrid are planned for the coming quarter. As the NVO development project comes to a close, we are undertaking a comprehensive review and assessment of all software (applications, tools, libraries) that have been developed in the past 6½ years. The goal is to understand the level of completeness and the long-term value so that we can identify those components that are most essential to support in the future.RVOSVOVObs.itVO-IndiaReports from WGs & IGs(follows order as at http://www.ivoa.net/forum/)Applications WGActivities in the Apps WG have been focused mainly on SAMP, and recently a small group has explored the idea of a VO Applications newsletter.
Data Access Layer WGThe DAL WG is actively involved the following areas: | ||||||||
Changed: | ||||||||
< < |
| |||||||
> > |
| |||||||
Interaction with Registry Working GroupWe are especially interested in the Registry WG schema for Service Registration and the various Resource schemata as they present opportunities for DAL services to exploit.Interaction with Grid and Web Services Working GroupVOSI is of particular importance to DAL services, especially Capabilities and Availability. By their nature, DAL services typically need monitoring by systems administrators, so the work on Availability is particularly relevant. | ||||||||
Changed: | ||||||||
< < | Data Models WG (MireilleLouys) | |||||||
> > | Data Models WG (MireilleLouys) | |||||||
From the last Interop in september 2007, the DM working group was involved in the following :
Interaction with the Theory IG :
Models in action : new developments
Grid and Web Services Working GroupThe main activity for the GWS working group over the past few months has been VOSpace 1.1. A working draft of the specification, WSDL and schema was released on 16 January 2008. Reference implementations have been/are under development at Caltech, UCSD, JHU, Astrogrid and CDS. At least one of these (UCSD) also interfaces with the iRODS software from SDSC. There has also been work on the VOSpace usage document (Harrison, Morris) which describes the core metadata terms that we will be registering. Members of the WG have been looking at security issues, including delegation (Rixon, Graham), particularly with a view to a more RESTful approach; and authorisation (Graham). There has also been work on VOSI (Rixon) and CEA/UWS (Harrison).Registry WGIn April, we passed a long awaited milestone when we officially began harvesting v1.0 standard records across the IVOA. A list of the 13 currently compliant registries can be viewed at http://rofr.ivoa.net/. With several weeks now of operation, we will discuss any remaining interoperability questions during the Trieste meeting. We will also hear about the various products and services that are now coming out that use the updated registry interfaces. Our attention can now be turned to moving our working draft documents through the standardization process. Most pressing are 2 VOResource schema extensions, VODataService and VOStandard, which are to be referenced explicitly in other maturing specs. Two particularly important drivers are TAP and VOSI. VODataService includes metadata for describing tables, and TAP is driving a number of changes pending in how this is done. VOSI provides a way to get the table metadata directly from the service in a uniform way. We note that the pending changes will require an uprev in the schema; thus, one new phenomenon we will have to deal with is supporting v1.1 and v1.0 records simultaneously within the registry framework (as not all registries will upgrade all their records at once). The registry framework allows for this, and so there should not be a problem with this; however, we will see if any issues arise in practice. This phenomenon will become more common as we across the IVOA working groups evolve our standards. Much like what is happening with STC, we still hear complaints that VOResource is too complicated, despite its apparent successful use in various apps in the IVOA. This is also despite design choices specifically meant to allow applications to only support the metadata they are interested in. I note that certain XML technologies--namely, XML binding tools that generate code automatically--work against our goals of enabling flexibilty and evolution, and their use should be discouraged in favor of other standard technologies. The demand for VOResource extensions remain strong. Nevertheless, discussion continues about how to ensure that simple registry use cases are implemented simply. The authors of the Outreach Metadata proposal, previously issued as an IVOA Note (http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/latest/AOIMetadata.html), have developed a revised version and have been actively engaging the outreach community for comments. This new version is currently be reformatted into a Working Draft. Once submitted to me, I will release it to the document repository, and develop a twiki discussion page. Their efforts have not gone unnoticed among alert IVOA people, and there is growing interest in this document (from Semantics and DM). The authors would like to encourage the development of prototypes and path-finder applications using this document. After a 6-month development period along with general discussion, we expect to hold a Registry WG session at the Baltimore IVOA meeting to discuss in detail the future of this document in the IVOA. I'll note that the authors have expressed some trepidation about a review by largely technically-minded IVOA insiders of a standard with focused, practical purpose for implementation by less-technically oriented outreach practitioners. -- RayPlante - 18 May 2008Semantics/UCD WGThe WG chair (APM) and vice-chair (SD) will not be present at the EXEC as they already had flights booked before the formal invitation was sent. What we hope to accomplish at this InterOp: The major subject of discussion will be "Vocabularies in the VO". The WD has been discussed at length, but there are still few open issues to settle down. The most important are
VOEventMajor prototyping work now is bringing in new event providers to the IVOA standard, and building scientifically useful tools, in order to show proper directions for future standards. Work in Trieste will involve digital signatures for VOEvents, registration of event streams and event stream repositories, standard vocabularies, extension schemas, and forming the VOEvent 2.0 standard.VOQL WGVOTable WG
Astro-RG IG
Data Curation and Preservation IGThe Data Curation and Preservation Interest Group intends to prepare a white paper describing the possible roles of the IVOA and its member projects in data curation and preservation initiatives. We intend to discuss the contents of the white paper in more detail at the May 2008 Interop in Trieste. We will also discuss DC&P efforts that are in progress in astronomy and related fields and how national and international standards efforts such as TRAC (http://www.crl.edu/PDF/trac.pdf) impact VO data providers.Theory IGWe have split up the former SNAP effort of the theory interest group in two separate ones: SimDB(=Simulation Database) and SimDAP(=Simulation Data Access Protocol). This report deals mainly with SimDB as that is where most progress has been made. The progress of this effort in terms of data models, XML schemas etc etc can be followed on the Volute, Google code SVN repository: http://volute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/theory/snap/. A Note is being written, which can be found under http://volute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/theory/snapdm/doc/note/SimDB-note.html.
SimDAPSimDAP concerns the data retrieval and more general access part of the old SNAP approach. After a time of slumber it was restarted recently by Claudio Gheller together with Rick Wagner. They are writing a note on this which will be discussed in Trieste. The progress of this effort can be followed on the Volute, Google-code SVN repository: http://volute.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/projects/theory/snap/.Micro-physics and SemanticsProgress in this area will be discussed in a session organised by Miguel Cervino and Franck LePetit.Suggestions for DM meta-specifications (see Mireille's contribution)We have seen that our approach using UML as source for scripts producing other representations of the model is working, viable and completely independent of theory. We think it can be of use to other data modelling efforts and suggest that the DM working group could start efforts to come up with a set of META-specifications on:
-- NicholasWalton - 14 Jan 2008
|